In 1985, nearly seventy years after the end of the first world war, authorities at Westminster Cathedral unveiled a plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorating sixteen poets who had fought in that conflict. Among the most famous of the group were Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves (the only one still living), Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. It was Owen who supplied the inscription that encircles the names: “My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is the pity.”
The work of poets like these, says Michael Korda, encapsulates much of what the public knows and understands of the first world war. In his new book, Muse of Fire, Korda offers the lives and work of six of the soldier poets — Brookes, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves, Owen, and the American poet Alan Seeger — as a way to understand that war anew.
Given the many shelves of work devoted to that calamitous struggle, this claim might seem overstated. And yet, as Korda points out, poetry has had a long association with war — think the Iliad and Odyssey — and at the time of the first world war it enjoyed a public currency that has become much devalued.
These were days when people routinely wrote verses for friends and family, when reams of poetry were memorised at school, when Rudyard Kipling was as famous as a modern sporting figure, and when newspapers and popular magazines ran poetry in abundance, much of it drawing on contemporaneous events. The poetry written during the war by Korda’s subjects was offered to a public much more receptive than our own.
Poetry was also unique among art forms, Korda points out, for its ability to escape censorship. Where the military censors routinely snipped indiscreet lines from soldiers’ letters, blacked out press reports potentially damaging to public morale, kept the official war artists at a distance and orchestrated staged scenes for photographers, they generally left poetry alone. An officer censoring Rosenberg’s mail, for example, waved the poems through with the comment that he “could not be bothered with going through such rubbish.”
Even if they had read it right through, I doubt officials would have been worried by the poetry of Rupert Brooke, the first of Korda’s subjects. The wave of patriotism and noble feeling that swept England when it entered the war is encapsulated in Brooke’s sonnet, “The Soldier.” Read aloud on Easter Sunday 1915 in St Paul’s Cathedral, it brought instant acclaim to its already celebrated poet author:
If I should die, think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
The acclaim was given bathetic poignancy when Brooke died three weeks later courtesy of a mosquito bite delivered while he was en-route to the imminent Gallipoli campaign. But the sentimentality of those lines soured after that campaign went awry; Gallipoli became the subject of bitter scorn once fighting began on the Western Front and every corner of every foreign field became sown with blood.
As Korda writes, and as many schoolchildren have doubtless been told, Wilfred Owen’s poetry appears to constitute a direct rejoinder to Brooke:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est.
Pro patria mori.
The journey from Brooke’s verses to those of Owen and his contemporaries constitutes the main arc of Muse of Fire. It is not, however, an uncomplicated trajectory. Korda’s inclusion of Alan Seeger, for example, allows him to draw attention to those whose patriotic feeling and enthusiasm for the war never waned. Seeger — uncle to Pete — was so desirous to fight that he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, endured its famously arduous training, and was stationed on the Western Front until his death, in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. He almost luxuriated in the war: the last person to see him alive recalled him “running forward, with his bayonet fixed” and “pride in his eye.”
Much like Brooke, Owen’s poetry can be read as a rejoinder to Seeger’s celebration of a noble death:
Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise…
Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks
(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain),
Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,
Gave them that grand occasion to excel,
That chance to live the life most free from stain
And that rare privilege of dying well.
Perhaps the most affecting life related, however, is Isaac Rosenberg’s. A child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he grew up in dire poverty in London but showed sufficient talent as a painter that community leaders paid for his study at the Slade Art School. He enlisted in 1915, likely out of a need for money, and was killed on the Western Front in 1918, aged twenty-eight. Some believed that Rosenberg’s work as a painter outstripped his poetry, but there is little denying the power of the close observation, attention to sound and refusal to smear away the sordid on display, for example, in “Dead Man’s Dump”:
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.
Korda winces at this poem: “The sound of the crunching of the bones is Isaac at his unflinching best.” But as a former publisher at Simon & Schuster, he knows quality when he sees it. While he modestly declaims any expertise — “I am not a literary critic; nor is this a book about poetry as such” — his selections and his readings of those selections are compelling.
Korda also knows what will have a person turn the page. Over the past two decades he has become an industrious popular biographer, with Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee among his subjects. In many ways, Muse of Fire is a typical volume of popular history. Its argument accumulates weight via narrative verve. It is built almost entirely on secondary scholarship. It shies from overt analysis. It is streamlined by elegant prose that occasionally gleams with intriguing, somewhat beguiling, personal asides. Noting, for example, that the tiered English school system helped to produce different accents, Korda adds, “I am good at recognising class differences in the way people speak, even though, having been educated in part in the United States and Switzerland, my own accent is mid-Atlantic, and I am sometimes mistaken for a Canadian.”
For all the professional acumen of its maker, however, Muse of Fire is a curiously unbalanced and at times unambitious volume. Its first third is devoted to Brooke, whose poetry is defined by its ornate lyricism and preoccupied with an idyllic, bucolic and rather quaint England. Korda goes into considerable detail about Brooke’s melodramatic romances and prewar life, with frequent mentions of the poet’s good looks and speculation about whether he had sex (and what that might mean) with this woman or that.
Brooke emerges as a golden-tongued Dorian Gray: fluent with a pen, charming to talk to and beautiful to look at, sure — but also self-obsessed, manipulative, callous, vain and, behind closed doors, something of a sex pest. He shows Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) his “trademark trick” of emerging from a river with an “instant erection”; he tells one-time lover Katherine “Ka” Cox that once she has “given” herself to him she is no longer her own mistress: “It means that you’re not as free to do anything as you were.”
Fascinating as Korda seems to find this — one senses he would like nothing better than to devote the whole book to Brooke — it is ultimately peripheral to his subject and has the effect of crowding out the other lives. Further limiting the book’s sweep is Korda’s decision to treat each of his subjects discretely. Instead of interweaving them, which would doubtless have been difficult, he generally leaves them to stand alone. This results in repetition (we have two accounts, 150 pages apart and pretty much the same, of a meeting between Brooke and Sassoon) and, more critically, in a much too superficial treatment of each poet’s development.
Korda’s keenness to use biography and poetry to depict the first world war makes him treat each poem as both autobiographical and, in its stylistic changes, driven wholly by the urge to depict the war in all its carnage. This approach dramatically underplays the role of his poets’ imagination, their reading, their engagement with debate about poetic direction and their responses to editing. The work of Edward Marsh, an aide to Churchill who was a benefactor, editor and confidant to most of Korda’s subjects — and who is given the best summation as an “indefatigable dowsing rod of talent’ — is particularly notable here, but Korda’s decision to isolate each of his subjects makes him a vague, arbitrary presence.
Then there is some odd sloppiness. Authorship of the Father Brown stories is given to Hilaire Belloc instead of G.K. Chesterton. Korda moves erratically between calling his subjects by their first names and then their surnames. On occasion, Wilfred Owen becomes Wilfred Owens.
“Seldom do poets play a significant role in history, or have a serious effect on politics or on public opinion,” Korda writes. The first world war is the exception. Both at the time and in subsequent years, poets like those commemorated at Westminster Cathedral have coloured how the war is understood and remembered. But even poetry has its limits. “Whatever else it did,” Korda concludes, “it did not end war — no war ever does.”
It does many other things, of course, and a strength of this book is that Korda quotes poetry evoking a wider vista of military life. There is Rosenberg’s self-explanatory “Marching”:
My eyes catch ruddy necks
Sturdily pressed back —
All a red-brick moving glint.
Like flaming pendulums, hands
Swing across the khaki —
Mustard coloured khaki —
To the automatic feet.
There’s Robert Graves’s comic mash of war and normalcy:
You’ll be dozing safe in your dug-out —
A great road, the trench shakes and falls about;
You’re choking, choking — then, hullo!
Marjorie’s walking gaily down the trench
Hanky to nose (that powder makes a stench!)
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny, she died ten years ago.
Ah, this is a queer time.
And there’s Siegfried Sassoon’s cold mimicry of Kipling in “The Kiss,” written after a lecture on fighting with a bayonet:
To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.
He spits and turns and loves the air,
And splits a skill to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.
Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss. •
Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
By Michael Korda | Liveright | $63.99 | 382 pages
